Medea: "There is just one life for each of us: our own"
By Euripides .
4/5
()
About this ebook
Euripides is rightly lauded as one of the great dramatists of all time. In his lifetime, he wrote over 90 plays and although only 18 have survived they reveal the scope and reach of his genius. Euripides is identified with many theatrical innovations that have influenced drama all the way down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. As would be expected from a life lived 2,500 years ago, details of it are few and far between. Accounts of his life, written down the ages, do exist but whether much is reliable or surmised is open to debate. Most accounts agree that he was born on Salamis Island around 480 BC, to mother Cleito and father Mnesarchus, a retailer who lived in a village near Athens. Upon the receipt of an oracle saying that his son was fated to win "crowns of victory", Mnesarchus insisted that the boy should train for a career in athletics. However, what is clear is that athletics was not to be the way to win crowns of victory. Euripides had been lucky enough to have been born in the era as the other two masters of Greek Tragedy; Sophocles and Æschylus. It was in their footsteps that he was destined to follow. His first play was performed some thirteen years after the first of Socrates plays and a mere three years after Æschylus had written his classic The Oristria. Theatre was becoming a very important part of the Greek culture. The Dionysia, held annually, was the most important festival of theatre and second only to the fore-runner of the Olympic games, the Panathenia, held every four years, in appeal. Euripides first competed in the City Dionysia, in 455 BC, one year after the death of Æschylus, and, incredibly, it was not until 441 BC that he won first prize. His final competition in Athens was in 408 BC. The Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis were performed after his death in 405 BC and first prize was awarded posthumously. Altogether his plays won first prize only five times. Euripides was also a great lyric poet. In Medea, for example, he composed for his city, Athens, "the noblest of her songs of praise". His lyric skills however are not just confined to individual poems: "A play of Euripides is a musical whole....one song echoes motifs from the preceding song, while introducing new ones." Much of his life and his whole career coincided with the struggle between Athens and Sparta for hegemony in Greece but he didn't live to see the final defeat of his city. Euripides fell out of favour with his fellow Athenian citizens and retired to the court of Archelaus, king of Macedon, who treated him with consideration and affection. At his death, in around 406BC, he was mourned by the king, who, refusing the request of the Athenians that his remains be carried back to the Greek city, buried him with much splendor within his own dominions. His tomb was placed at the confluence of two streams, near Arethusa in Macedonia, and a cenotaph was built to his memory on the road from Athens towards the Piraeus.
Read more from Euripides .
Heracles: "The greatest pleasure of life is love" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOrestes: "Youth is the best time to be rich, and the best time to be poor" Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Electra: "Friends show their love in times of trouble, not in happiness" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRhesus: "Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing" Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Iphigenia in Aulis: "Love makes the time pass. Time makes love pass" Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Alcestis: "One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Suppliants: "Do not consider painful what is good for you" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHelen: "To a father growing old nothing is dearer than a daughter" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Heraclidæ: "Nothing has more strength than dire necessity" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAndromache: "The wavering mind is but a base possession" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Bacchæ: "The good and the wise lead quiet lives" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsElectra: "To a father growing old nothing is dearer than a daughter" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHippolytus: "Silence is true wisdom's best reply" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Cyclops: "Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Iphigenia in Taurus: "Among mortals second thoughts are wisest" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Phœnician Virgins: "Better a serpent than a stepmother!" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHecuba: "He was a wise man who originated the idea of God" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Trojan Women: "Much effort, much prosperity" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIon: "Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Medea
Related ebooks
Medea Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Medea of Euripides Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMedea (Translated with an Introduction and Annotations by Gilbert Murray) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHecuba: "He was a wise man who originated the idea of God" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Suppliant Maidens: "Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times" Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Adventures of Ulysses the Wanderer Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Iphigenia in Taurus: "Among mortals second thoughts are wisest" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHarvard Classics Volume 22: The Odyssey, Homer Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Tragedies of Euripides Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Children of the Dawn : Old Tales of Greece Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHippolytus: "Silence is true wisdom's best reply" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJason and the Argonauts Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Odyssey (The Samuel Butcher and Andrew Lang Prose Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ten Tragedies of Euripides Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Odyssey SparkNotes Literature Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Iliad and the Odyssey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAlcestis: "One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Trojan Women: "Much effort, much prosperity" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsArcadian Days: Gods, Women, and Men from Greek Myths Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChildren of the Dawn : Old Tales of Greece Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEros: Love-life in Ancient Greece Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Odyssey (Translated into prose by Samuel Butler with an Introduction by William Lucas Collins) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Prometheus Bound Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings7 short stories that Aries will love Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Classical Mythology: Myths and Legends of the Ancient World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAesop's Fables Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Odyssey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, Rendered into English Prose Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Performing Arts For You
Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Whale / A Bright New Boise Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Romeo and Juliet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Quite Nice and Fairly Accurate Good Omens Script Book: The Script Book Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Diamond Eye: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How I Learned to Drive (Stand-Alone TCG Edition) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Coreyography: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hamlet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lucky Dog Lessons: From Renowned Expert Dog Trainer and Host of Lucky Dog: Reunions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hollywood's Dark History: Silver Screen Scandals Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Yes Please Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rodney Saulsberry's Tongue Twisters and Vocal Warm-Ups: With Other Vocal Care Tips Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Best Women's Monologues from New Plays, 2020 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Trial Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wuthering Heights Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Our Town: A Play in Three Acts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Robin Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Strange Loop Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Is This Anything? Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey Into Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Medea
30 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very nice translation with informative explanations of the Choral statements
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Besides, you are a born woman:
feeble when it comes to the sublime,
marvelously inventive over crime.
Oh Medea, you emerge as the force in this tumultuous collection and such a distinction is not lost on the gore-spattered pages where it take an epic hero to return a lost love from the dead to a shitbag husband (Alcestis) and then later a hallucination to inspire an incestual dismemberment (Bacchae). My reading of Medea is anchored by her being foreign-born, a stranger whose displacement is opened wide by her jackass husband and his efforts at social elevation through snagging a new bride of royal (and white) stock. There is something to be said for the original Lady Vengeance. Her vision and pluck are to be respected even if we cower and squirm before her monstrous deeds. She maintains a grace evn in the darkest light.
Book preview
Medea - Euripides .
Medea by Euripides
Euripides is rightly lauded as one of the great dramatists of all time. In his lifetime, he wrote over 90 plays and although only 18 have survived they reveal the scope and reach of his genius.
Euripides is identified with many theatrical innovations that have influenced drama all the way down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.
As would be expected from a life lived 2,500 years ago, details of it are few and far between. Accounts of his life, written down the ages, do exist but whether much is reliable or surmised is open to debate.
Most accounts agree that he was born on Salamis Island around 480 BC, to mother Cleito and father Mnesarchus, a retailer who lived in a village near Athens. Upon the receipt of an oracle saying that his son was fated to win crowns of victory
, Mnesarchus insisted that the boy should train for a career in athletics.
However, what is clear is that athletics was not to be the way to win crowns of victory. Euripides had been lucky enough to have been born in the era as the other two masters of Greek Tragedy; Sophocles and Æschylus. It was in their footsteps that he was destined to follow.
His first play was performed some thirteen years after the first of Socrates plays and a mere three years after Æschylus had written his classic The Oristria.
Theatre was becoming a very important part of the Greek culture. The Dionysia, held annually, was the most important festival of theatre and second only to the fore-runner of the Olympic games, the Panathenia, held every four years, in appeal.
Euripides first competed in the City Dionysia, in 455 BC, one year after the death of Æschylus, and, incredibly, it was not until 441 BC that he won first prize. His final competition in Athens was in 408 BC. The Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis were performed after his death in 405 BC and first prize was awarded posthumously. Altogether his plays won first prize only five times.
Euripides was also a great lyric poet. In Medea, for example, he composed for his city, Athens, the noblest of her songs of praise
. His lyric skills however are not just confined to individual poems: A play of Euripides is a musical whole....one song echoes motifs from the preceding song, while introducing new ones.
Much of his life and his whole career coincided with the struggle between Athens and Sparta for hegemony in Greece but he didn't live to see the final defeat of his city.
Euripides fell out of favour with his fellow Athenian citizens and retired to the court of Archelaus, king of Macedon, who treated him with consideration and affection.
At his death, in around 406BC, he was mourned by the king, who, refusing the request of the Athenians that his remains be carried back to the Greek city, buried him with much splendor within his own dominions. His tomb was placed at the confluence of two streams, near Arethusa in Macedonia, and a cenotaph was built to his memory on the road from Athens towards the Piraeus.
Index of Contents
MEDEA – The Gilbert Murray Translation
Introduction
The Persons
Scene
First Performed
MEDEA
MEDEA – The Theodore Alois Buckley Translation
The Persons
Scene
The Argument
MEDEA
Euripides – A Short Biography
Euripides – A Concise Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
The Medea, in spite of its background of wonder and enchantment, is not a romantic play but a tragedy of character and situation. It deals, so to speak, not with the romance itself, but with the end of the romance, a thing which is so terribly often the reverse of romantic. For all but the very highest of romances are apt to have just one flaw somewhere, and in the story of Jason and Medea the flaw was of a fatal kind.
The wildness and beauty of the Argo legend run through all Greek literature, from the mass of Corinthian lays older than our present Iliad, which later writers vaguely associate with the name of Eumêlus, to the Fourth Pythian Ode of Pindar and the beautiful Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. Our poet knows the wildness and the beauty; but it is not these qualities that he specially seeks. He takes them almost for granted, and pierces through them to the sheer tragedy that lies below.
Jason, son of Aeson, King of Iôlcos, in Thessaly, began his life in exile. His uncle Pelias had seized his father's kingdom, and Jason was borne away to the mountains by night and given, wrapped in a purple robe, to Chiron, the Centaur. When he reached manhood he came down to Iôlcos to demand, as Pindar tells us, his ancestral honour, and stood in the market-place, a world-famous figure, one-sandalled, with his pard-skin, his two spears and his long hair, gentle and wild and fearless, as the Wise Beast had reared him. Pelias, cowed but loath to yield, promised to give up the kingdom if Jason would make his way to the unknown land of Colchis and perform a double quest. First, if I read Pindar aright, he must fetch back the soul of his kinsman Phrixus, who had died there far from home; and, secondly, find the fleece of the Golden Ram which Phrixus had sacrificed. Jason undertook the quest: gathered the most daring heroes from all parts of Hellas; built the first ship, Argo, and set to sea. After all manner of desperate adventures he reached the land of Aiêtês, king of the Colchians, and there hope failed him. By policy, by tact, by sheer courage he did all that man could do. But Aiêtês was both hostile and treacherous. The Argonauts were surrounded, and their destruction seemed only a question of days when, suddenly, unasked, and by the mercy of Heaven, Aiêtês' daughter, Mêdêa, an enchantress as well as a princess, fell in love with Jason. She helped him through all his trials; slew for him her own sleepless serpent, who guarded the fleece; deceived her father, and secured both the fleece and the soul of Phrixus. At the last moment it appeared that her brother, Absyrtus, was about to lay an ambush for Jason. She invited Absyrtus to her room, stabbed him dead, and fled with Jason over the seas. She had given up all, and expected in return a perfect love.
And what of Jason? He could not possibly avoid taking Medea with him. He probably rather loved her. She formed at the least a brilliant addition to the glory of his enterprise. Not many heroes could produce a barbarian princess ready to leave all and follow them in blind trust. For of course, as every one knew without the telling in fifth-century Athens, no legal marriage was possible between a Greek and a barbarian from Colchis.
All through the voyage home, a world-wide baffled voyage by the Ister and the Eridanus and the African Syrtes, Medea was still in her element, and proved a constant help and counsellor to the Argonauts. When they reached Jason's home, where Pelias was still king, things began to be different. An ordered and law-abiding Greek state was scarcely the place for the untamed Colchian. We only know the catastrophe. She saw with smothered rage how Pelias hated Jason and was bent on keeping the kingdom from him, and she determined to do her lover another act of splendid service. Making the most of her fame as an enchantress, she persuaded Pelias that he could, by a certain process, regain his youth. He eagerly caught at the hope. His daughters tried the process upon him, and Pelias died in agony. Surely Jason would be grateful now!
The real result was what it was sure to be in a civilised country. Medea and her lover had to fly for their lives, and Jason was debarred for ever from succeeding to the throne of Iôlcos. Probably there was another result also in Jason's mind: the conclusion that at all costs he must somehow separate himself from this wild beast of a woman who was ruining his life. He directed their flight to Corinth, governed at the time by a ruler of some sort, whether tyrant
or king, who was growing old and had an only daughter. Creon would naturally want a son-in-law to support and succeed him. And where in all Greece could he find one stronger or more famous than the chief of the Argonauts? If only Medea were not there! No doubt Jason owed her a great debt for her various services. Still, after all, he was not married to her. And a man must not be weak in such matters as these. Jason accepted the princess's hand, and when Medea became violent, found it difficult to be really angry with Creon for instantly condemning her to exile. At this point the tragedy begins.
The Medea is one of the earliest of Euripides' works now